Thanks much for replying, Addis. I was reading up some more on networking (by the way, it's such a freaking pain to find even slightly advanced networking guides online; most sites seem to be too n00bish: "what's the difference between a router, hub, and switch?" and that sort of thing), and I now think that my first post might be unclear. So let me try to clarify some things.
Firstly, my intent in this whole business of messing with static IP's is NOT to run a server behind my router. I just want to do some bit-torrenting (you can check out
my other thread).
Secondly, at the time of making my first post, I had forgotten that there can be static or dynamic IP's on two levels: the computers on a network behind the router can have static or dynamic private IP's (which is what I was talking about), but also the router connecting to the internet can have a static or a dynamic public IP assigned by the ISP (that's what I forgot about).
Sooo, if I understand network theory correctly, if I am only wanting to do bit-torrenting, and am NOT running a server, then I do NOT need my router to have a static public IP, correct?? In other words, my ISP can continue to assign an IP to my router dynamically, right? It seems to me that I only need my computer behind the router to have a static
private IP so that the router can forward any torrent download requests to my comp. Am I understanding this right??
If I got this stuff right, then what you said here applies to me, right?
You can set a static IP on the client, you don't need to do anything on your router/server. Make sure you manually fill in the IP, subnet mask, and DNS servers on the client. You should be able to put just the router's IP for the DNS part, and it should work. The subnet mask is usually 255.255.255.0.
So I'll just type in a static IP address in my control panel > network connections thingy and I'll be set, right?
Haha it does seem like you already gave me the answer and that I'm probably being redundant asking you to verify it again but I just want to make sure lol. Thanks!